Deprogramming Christians

Introduction

This essay considers the question how can you ethically deprogram Christians, free
them of their delusional ideas that make them behave so badly. I don’t particularly
care what they believe, just what they do. However, their anti-social behaviour is
generated by their delusions, so at least some of those delusions are going to have to go
if Christians are to become co-operative citizens.

The Behaviours

These are the behaviours I would like to discourage in Christians: in descending order
of importance:

Discrimination against gays must stop. It is illegal. We must not continue to let
Christians get away with advocating murder and hate speech against gays. Just because
they break the law out of religious hatred should not give them a get-out-of-jail-free
card.

Christians must stop interfering with marriages between gays. Christians are not
affected in any way so have no right to meddle. They have no right to cherry pick their
bible and use it as an excuse to persecute minorities, originally blacks, now gays. We
have freedom of religion and freedom from religion and that includes freedom from the
most hateful religion of them all — Christianity.

Christians must stop interfering in other people’s end of life
decisions.

Disband churches that aid and abet threats and violence against children to force
them into sexual acts.

Christians must stop interfering in other people’s abortions. Their
objections are based on a religious superstition that a disembodied consciousness, a
ghost, called a soul, possesses the body at conception and leaves it at death. There is
not one iota of evidence to substantiate this nonsense.

Christians must stop interfering in other people’s contraception. It is none
of their business.

Christians must stop teaching junk science in public schools.

The government must stop giving religious lobbyists, i.e. politically active
churches, tax breaks than other lobbyists do not get.

Churches should get the exact same tax breaks other organisations get, only breaks
for their charitable works, not just for being a church.

Full disclosure of how religious donations are spent.

Protect children from Christian parents doing harmful things to them for religious
reasons, such as denying medical care for snake bites.

Prosecute faith healers for false claims, just as any other false advertiser.

Make it illegal to proselytise to other people’s children without their
parents’ explicit signed permission.

No circumcision male or female without consent.

The Pope must formally disown the parts of the bible that demand criminal behaviour
or that encourage hate to various minority groups.

A moratorium on Christmas music and Christmas programming one day in seven during
December. It is nauseating, like a diet of pure high fructose corn syrup. It in unfair
of Christians to impose the torture on others without relief.

These reforms apply mostly to Christians, but of course any changes in law would not
single them out.

Beliefs

By far the most toxic belief is that Christians consider themselves God’s Chosen People. This notion is as racist and as repulsive as
Hitler’s notion of master race. Subscribing the this toxic doctrine is like having
a KKK (Klu Klux Klan) sheet in your closet and being proud of it. Christians see
themselves having a right to impose their revolting religion on others.

American Christians believe that the USA is God’s Chosen
Country This gives America the right to attack any country it please, even when it
did not attack first or present any threat. American has the right to strip it of its
resources. It calls anyone who opposes them a terrorist.

Christians are so conceited they imagine the rules that apply to everyone else do not
apply to them. They impose their religion on others, but when someone else so much as
erects a mosque, Christian vigilantes attack.

They believe you cannot die. This means you are not really doing anyone harm by
killing them and no one can really kill you. Christians have no natural aversion to
murder and war. To them, life is like a video game where being killed does not mean game
over. Get these lunatics away from me.

They believe in ghosts called souls. These ghosts possess the fertilised egg and leave
at death. This superstition is at the heart of the Christian abortion position.

The god Jehovah owns all the souls and bodies in the same sense a plantation owner
owns slaves. It is wicked to even think about rebellion. Christians believe they have the
right to torture non-Christians as they are dying to keep them from committing suicide
and offending Jehovah. When I think about this, I find myself wishing for some way to
eliminate Christians altogether, not just their meddling religion.

The god Jehovah was once terribly worried humans would die out from insufficient
fertility, so he made up rules to ensure the maximal number of pregnancies. He even
insisted that gay people breed. He threatened anyone who used contraception with eternal
torment. Unfortunately, he never got around to reversing these breeding commandments now
that earth is bulging at the seams with 7.3 billion.

Christians believe that some people have a special gift for invoking the god Jehovah
and persuading him to heal them. These scum collect huge amounts of money from the
elderly and seriously ill, but only prey on fellow Christians. Some believe they will be
punished in eternity for using any other form of healing even after faith healing as
proved ineffective.

Unconvincing Arguments

We have discovered the universe works just fine without a god. It works all by
itself. It does not need divine tinkering. A god does not explain anything, does not
predict anything and it creates an even bigger mystery than it claims to solve.

Christianity has conceded the earth is not flat, that the earth is not the center
of the the universe, that black people are not inferior, that slavery is not acceptable
and it is not ok to torture animals. The pope disavowed creationism (the young earth
claim). If it was wrong about all those important things, what else is it wrong about?
e.g. it is virtue to kill gay people and abortion doctors. It can’t very well
claim universal infallibility when it has already admitted it was wrong so many
times.

Christian are among the worst behaved people in any religion or philosophy.

If there is a god, he is utterly heartless. If you read the old testament the god Jehovah is described as worse than
Saddam Hussein. Even if such a god existed, it would be despicable to toady to him.

Even if you think the god Jehovah is the best thing since sliced bread, the
Catholic church is a criminal organisation. It is the biggest pedophile ring on the
planet. Your money goes to the church, not to Jehovah. Similarly other churches are
just money-making businesses with a thin phony Christian veneer.

Don’t be daft. That is just grape juice and a cracker. The claim it is blood
and meat is as silly as the claim of the invisible clothes in the Emperor’s
New Clothes. There is no way anyone could tell the difference.
Owataboobeyeam.

25% of Americans now reject religion. Around the world
the numbers are much higher. Christianity is a barbaric iron age idea whose time has
passed. It no longer generates ethical behaviour. You will be far from alone if you
decide to drop superstitions and keep the best of Christian ethical behaviour.

People who pray don’t do any better than people who do not. Otherwise there
would be an insurance discount for Christians. You are wasting your
time (i.e. hurting your chances) if you think begging goodies from an invisible man
will get you anywhere. That is lazy wishful thinking hoping to get something for
nothing.

Jehovah is evil, cruel, capricious and insane. Read the old testament in its
entirety. The conclusion in inescapable. It is disgraceful that so many people debase
themselves by worshiping this bastard purely out of fear. It is ridiculous given that
he is imaginary.

However, these arguments are not convincing to Christians. They have been trained to
distrust their own ability to reason and to distrust reason itself. If they noticed
something apparently inconsistent in the bible, they figure they must
have made an error, no matter how obvious. They say to themselves, Wiser Christians than me must have an explanation for this. It is not my humble
duty to question god. They conflate questioning church authority with questioning
god.

Convincing Arguments

What sorts of arguments are convincing?

I heard a story about a man who went on a sea voyage back in the 1800s. He asked the captain if navigation would be possible if he did not
presume a spherical earth. The captain said no. His life
was in the captain’s hands. So he dropped his flat earth view and the entire
biblical ball of wax right there.

A string of unfortunate events convinces a Christian that it makes no sense that a
loving god would punish him this way when he had done nothing wrong. His own faith is
his innocence was stronger than his faith in the god Jehovah. Unfortunately, a string
of unfortunate events can also push someone into Christianity,
desperately looking for some solace and hope. For example, Christians in
Montréal disgracefully pounced on Jun Li’s mother (the boy Luka Rocco
Magnotta decapitated) and pushed her to convert to Christianity while she was
completely vulnerable and in shock.

It seems most often discarding Christianity is a very gradual process. Piece by
piece the lies holding the grand delusion in place blow away. Teresa MacBain was a
pastor for 20 years then gradually lost faith through four
phases:

The contradictory nature of the Bible; the lack of scientific or historical
foundation or accuracy, which took her a very, very long time to come to terms
with. That was the starting point when she realized that the Bible wasn’t
true.

From there she moved to thinking about all of the religions in the world and
how people basically associate, in most cases, with one religion or another based
upon their own culture and how they were raised.

She then moved to a position where she thought that all religions were equally
valid and that it depended on who you were and how you were raised but that we were
all on the same journey.

From there she moved to the question of the existence of hell and trying to
understand how a supreme being could create humans that according to the Christian
Bible are very weak and finite, as compared to God. How that creature, being,
entity, whatever you want to call it, could punish them eternally in such a
horrible and torturous place as hell.

I think the essential problem is terror. Even if a Christian were 99% sure the bogeyman Jehovah were a crock, they still can’t take
the chance of failing to suck up to him, because he is such a nasty bastard. Their
inner child needs heavy reassurance no bogeyman will get them if they dump
Christianity. Christians often argue by saying even if there were only 1 in 1000 chance it were true, the consequences
of not believing are so dire, you should at least pretend to believe. They don’t
seem to notice this is holy blackmail. Any religion that resorts to filthy tactics like
that deserves to be spat on. Only a sniveling coward would be taken in by such a slimy
trick. And surely an omniscient evil deity would not be fooled by feigned belief.
Despite how confident, bullying and obnoxious Christians can be, we have to remember
most were seriously traumatised and terrorised as very young children by adults telling
them stories of a terrible god that spies on them all the time and burns them alive
forever if they don’t do exactly what parents command. What might work are
processes similar to those the late Ken Keyes used to heal childhood trauma. He would
take people back to the traumatic event and have them relive it, but this time with
plenty of reassurance and comfort, to face the terror but with the additional resource
of adult understanding and the knowledge they survived it the first time. Once the
general public becomes aware of the brutal techniques Christians use to beat and
terrify Christianity into their tiny kids, it will lose some of its halo.